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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9759261" data-attributes="member: 725">Technology isn't dismantling democracy, it's people, it has always been people. That they now use electrons instead of muskets doesn't really matter.Centralizing power in individuals and corporations isn't exactly new either. People: The Kings/Queens, Emperors, Popes, nobility, Guild leaders, etc. Corporations: VOC, Standard Oil, AT&T, etc.Replacing wide swaths of workers: Industrial Revolution (1760+), automation '60s+, windmills already replaced people ~1700BC.The photo camera replaced portrait painters since 1800-1900...The Steam engine fueled the economy for a LONG time, technology from a long time ago.The problem being is that people only look at what's new for them. And their own specific culture, the 'gig economy' also tends to be an US phenomenon. And that's coming from someone who lives in the country that apparently has the most people working part time (Netherlands).Shrugs While your AI.chatbot sex toy might try to talk you into suicide. The tradition of marrying into family X, kill spouse (usually poison or 'accident'), inherit everything, rinse and repeat is a millennia long tradition... It's just a developed technology that seemed interesting initially, had some nasty side effects, and in retrospect seemed like idiocy. Bayer Laboratories developed heroin cough syrup in 1898... Bayer AG still exists by the way, a $50 billion/year company, still active in pharmaceuticals, even after their stint with slave labour from concentration camps and general Holocaust shenanigans...You're looking at bad aspects in your culture and assigning it as 'living in a cyberpunk age'. 1+1 is normally 2, you're making it into 11 or something. With that kind of reasoning you can say that the industrial revolution also was a cyberpunk age...And would chili be chili without chili? No. Does a dish with chili, be chili? Also no. There's a certain combination of ingredients and preparation ranges that makes chili, chili. There are tons of dishes made with chili (pepers), they aren't all chili. Just because you see certain ingredients used in your current reality, doesn't mean that it's cyberpunk at the moment. Sure, the US might be a bit dystopian at the moment, so were certain other countries in certain other times, they get over it eventually... And the dystopian part is also just a matter of perspective, other people might not see it that way.Just because you say it is, doesn't make it so. Someone else made the Cyberpunk genre and added a definition to it, giving it your own definition, doesn't help the genre or discussing it.</blockquote>

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